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Where Christianity Ends

June 17, 2015 3:51 pmJune 17, 2015 3:51 pm

Last week I wrote a post on Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner and American religion in which I channeled Harold Bloom (via Will Wilkinson) and talked a bit about the Americanization of Christianity: What it means, whether it’s irresistible, and at what point in the process we should stop talking about American faith in terms of Christian heresy (my preferred terminology) and start talking about a new religion altogether.

One of my frequent interlocutors on these issues, Damon Linker, took up the thread and suggested that I (along with other would-be “orthodox” Christians) are trying to impose a level of coherence, consistency and theological stability on Christianity that the faith’s history does not really support. Notwithstanding the best efforts of popes, theologians and ecumenical councils, he argues, Christian belief has proven the most protean of ideas, flourishing in all sorts of forms and contexts and cultures and constantly revising itself — institutionally, morally, theologically — as necessary to meet its new adherents’ needs. And then, too, he suggests, the subversive message of the gospels has a logic all its own, pointing inexorably toward a radical egalitarianism and individualism that no hierarchy, even one that’s trying to uphold the New Testament’s own moral prohibitions, can successfully resist. Combine those two points, and you have Linker’s concluding question: “What if the ‘Americanization of Christianity’ is no less legitimate — no less a plausible transformation of the gospel message — than the Romanization of Christianity that took place in the centuries immediately following Christ’s death, establishing the Catholic Church’s ecclesiastical authority in the first place?”

My answer would be that it depends on what you mean by “legitimate” and “plausible.” If you mean faithful to what we know about what Jesus taught and did and what his earliest followers believed, then obviously I think the answer is no: Whatever corruptions came in when the church went Roman, post-Constantinian Christianity (its creeds, its canon, its structure, its basic moral orientation) offered a far more compelling, coherent, sophisticated attempt at a holistic reading of the Jesus story than do Christianity’s latter-day Americanizers, from Emerson to Peale to Oprah and Osteen. I’m not going to prove this point to Linker’s satisfaction or the reader’s in a blog post (though I’ve tried a little elsewhere), but it’s the essence of the small-o orthodox Christian critique of contemporary heresy: The argument is not simply that purveyors of contemporary Christian-ish spirituality are failing to “respect the authoritah” of the pope or the Bible or the Council of Nicaea; it’s that their re-interpretation of Christianity is intellectually weaker, more historically unlikely, and more partial and selective than more traditional alternatives. If you assume Christianity is the key religious revelation in human history, as anyone who self-defines as “Christian” implicitly does, the orthodox interpretation (whether in its Roman, Eastern or Reformed form; the argument between those branches is of course yet another matter still) is simply more likely to be the true one than the Americanized version that’s spent the last few hundred years coming into being.

But this is not to say that an Americanized Christianity cannot be described as as “legitimate” form of the faith in another important sense. So long as it’s still directly inspired by Christ’s words and deeds, so long as it does him homage in varying ways and with some degree of fervor, and so long as it’s still organized around moral and theological premises that are unimaginable absent the legacy of historic Christianity and the influence of the gospel narrative, the overall American religious tendency clearly belongs to the same religious family, the same (yes, sometimes very) broad tradition, as what I and others would call Christian orthodoxy. This is where I agree with Linker: Heresy is part of Christianity, integral to its history and development, and the proliferation of heresies across the centuries is intimately connected to Christianity’s overall genius and resilience (and should be appreciated as such, in certain contexts at least, by the self-consciously orthodox).

Which is why I think it’s a mistake, both theologically and personally, to read individuals and cultures out of the Christian family prematurely, just because you think they’re moving, in deed or word, away from essential elements of the faith. This is true when we’re debating the faith of President Obama; it’s true of Bruce/ Caitlyn Jenner; it’s true of anyone who publicly identifies with Christian faith, and even of some who don’t. Indeed, this is the whole point of talking about “orthodoxy” and “heresy” — it frees you, at least somewhat, to acknowledge just how permeated by Christian ideas and influences even a culture trending away from the faith can still remain.

But only up to a point. You can take a big-tent view of what counts as Christianity, as I try to do, while still recognizing that some worldviews, some people, can be Christian-influenced while ultimately deserving a very different label. For instance, is a figure like Richard Dawkins still influenced by Christianity? Certainly, in the sense that his is a very Anglican sort of atheism, in the sense that his moralism and Whiggish view of history alike have Christian roots, in various other intellectual and cultural senses … But is he a Christian? Well no, he is not; he is something else, something genuinely post-Christian; whatever Christian-ish ideas he still holds together with his atheism, the label itself no longer fits. Likewise other figures and ideas, present-day and historical. Yes, it’s intellectually helpful to read Karl Marx’s ideas as a kind of materialist/political heresy of Christianity, it’s theologically useful to trace the development of “Aryan Christ” ideas as a bridge from Christianity to Germanic racial supremacy. But Marxism and National Socialism remain essentially post-Christian ideas, and Lenin and Hitler remain essentially anti-Christian leaders; any description of them as Christians flirts with the absurd.

These are intentionally extreme examples; they don’t tell you where to find the breaking point. And I don’t know exactly where to find it myself. But as long as we’re talking about transgender issues and sex-reassignment surgery, consider the following two passages. The first discusses Jenner’s own religious faith, and it’s written by a youth leader at the church he/she attended:

She [then Bruce] was there at church almost every Sunday, sitting in the front row and singing along to every song if she could. She would chat with me before services and make fun of how I wore sandals every day … I eventually left that church under great terms … Caitlyn was there my final Sunday and gave me a big hug wishing me well.

News came out a few months later that Caitlyn would no longer identify herself as Bruce Jenner.

My newsfeed is flooded by both enormous support and enormous disappointment. Most of my friends who don’t know Jesus were in support of Caitlyn, proclaiming their acceptance and love for her. Those who did know Jesus were mostly either silent or derogatory.

Today, I can’t help but think how backward that is.

Caitlyn knows who Jesus is, and Jesus knows her by name. Whether that sits comfortably on a Facebook timeline or blog comment, I know firsthand that Caitlyn has heard the good news.

And, Caitlyn has taught me more about Jesus.

Caitlyn taught me to be bold. Jesus was bold enough to overturn tables at his father’s temple, he was bold enough to stand up to the religious leaders of his day and let them know they had it backwards. In the Bible, we see the oppressed overcome the oppressor and the meek become strong. That is the core of the Jesus I know. Jesus came to eat with the people no one would be seen with, to turn the tax collector into an honest man. He came to transform the world.

… Jesus wasn’t one to turn away from those the world had labeled broken. He was the one who would walk toward them with open arms.

Now, I could write you an essay on how this view of Jesus is true but partial, sincere but incomplete, more faithful to American ideas about the self than to the words in the New Testament … but my point here is that it is recognizably Christian in some of the senses I described above, and that even if I think it represents a version of the American heresy in action I also feel the author and I still share some important assumptions about God, morality and human flourishing that could enable us to argue in good faith.

In Belgium and in the Netherlands, where patients can be euthanized even if they do not have a terminal illness, the laws seem to have permeated the medical establishment more deeply than elsewhere, perhaps because of the central role granted to doctors: in the majority of cases, it is the doctor, not the patient, who commits the final act. In the past five years, the number of euthanasia and assisted-suicide deaths in the Netherlands has doubled, and in Belgium it has increased by more than a hundred and fifty per cent. Although most of the Belgian patients had cancer, people have also been euthanized because they had autism, anorexia, borderline personality disorder, chronic-fatigue syndrome, partial paralysis, blindness coupled with deafness, and manic depression. In 2013, Wim Distelmans euthanized a forty-four-year-old transgender man, Nathan Verhelst, because Verhelst was devastated by the failure of his sex-change surgeries; he said that he felt like a monster when he looked in the mirror. “Farewell, everybody,” Verhelst said from his hospital bed, seconds before receiving a lethal injection.

Now: Could you argue that what’s happening in Belgium is on a continuum with what’s happening in America, that the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner and the death of Nathan Verhelst are both manifestations of expressive individualism in action? Yes. Could you trace, with Linker and Tocqueville and others, the roots of both forms of individualism in certain Christian ideas, certain (selectively-chosen) gospel admonitions? Yes again. Could you argue that there’s a clear cultural slope that could take Americans, too, from celebrating the man who transitions to womanhood to permitting his medically-administered quietus in the event that the transition doesn’t work out? One certainly could.

But the two stories still represent very different points on the continuum, two very different places on the path away from Christendom. I look at the celebrations of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner and see, with Bloom and Wilkinson, a gnostic-influenced Christian heresy; I look at the death of Nathan Verhelst and see Belgian Christianity’s eclipse, disappearance, defeat. I look at the United States, sexually permissive but still deeply conflicted on abortion and moving only slowly toward limited forms of physician-assisted suicide, and see a nation that’s Americanized its Christian inheritance but hasn’t yet jettisoned it. I look at the Belgium, or at least the Belgian medical and media culture, portrayed in the New Yorker and see a social reality to which the term “Christian” no longer meaningfully applies.

Again, where precisely the break happens I can’t claim to know. But in Belgium it seems to have happened; here, not yet. Not yet.

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Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.